


The Slow Path

by galfridian



Category: Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-22
Updated: 2008-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-01 16:26:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/pseuds/galfridian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years, twenty weeks, and three days on the slow path with Robert Goren.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Slow Path

**Author's Note:**

> My first publishable _Criminal Intent_ story. This is, in some ways, speculative because (1) I have only seen about twenty episodes of the series; (2) they have not been later episodes; (3) I therefore have a looser grasp on the characters than writers more familiar with the series. It's also unbeta-ed.

Eames thought comparisons were often unjust fallacies. What spurs a person to compare one circumstance to another, she often wondered. She saw it in her mother’s life: her mother versus her aunt, her mother asking, “Why aren’t you more like your sister?” It drifted like a disease through familial generations, the art of comparing one to another.

Her father once, early on, asked, “Is your partner much like Joe?” And all she could say was, “No, I don’t think so,” because Joe was her husband, and Goren is her partner, and the situations didn’t mesh. She hadn’t considered it. But she sat at home that night and tried to draw the lines: here’s where Joe was like Goren, here’s where he wasn’t. She realized she found more “wasn’t” than “was” and she spent a month reprimanding herself for thinking Goren sometimes fell short.

It was years later that Eames discovered she had started to wonder why Joe wasn’t more like her partner.

Somewhere, at some unknown time, Bobby Goren became the victor.

 

 

The most difficult thing was not comparing their partnership to others’. In the Major Cases office, she and Goren were an anomaly: the only male-female partnership to survive three years.

And it wasn’t a secret that they were the suspects in a drama called inner-office affairs. Nor was it a secret that their work exceeded that of most of the others.

But their partnership was imperfect, although rarely did two pieces function so well with one another, because what took most pairs six months or less took them twelve months or more: no beers, no late night television.

Goren was different. They were different. In her frustration, Eames caught herself more than once as she was about to ask inane questions like “what’s your favorite color,” out of unadulterated desperation to know _something_.

When Detective Logan came, she was almost shell-shocked. He was neither elusive nor closed. He told and talked. She wished he wouldn’t. Through Bobby, she had discovered the beauty of slow discovery.

 

 

The afterhours partner behaviors came right away with Logan. Within weeks, he had them at bars with him. He was friendly and curious; she both appreciated and resented it.

This quality somehow became their conversation. “I think it’s just part of your inability to shut up,” Bobby teased.

“You shoot to wound, don’t you? I didn’t expect that. She’s the one I was warned about.” He gestured in her direction.

“Give yourself a while with her. You’ll pick it up too.”

Logan’s grin was both easy and thoughtful. “But then, you weren’t what I thought either,” he confessed to Eames.

“In what way?”

He nodded toward Bobby. “His wall’s obvious. It’s like—he doesn’t need the Beware of Dog sign, because it’s pretty obvious from the chewed up fence what side you should be on. But you—you prod and you’re insistent, but you’ve got an invisible wall. No one knows it’s there until they’ve run into it.”

_Each one influences the other._

 

 

What she would never admit to Bobby, because it was quite possibly the most humiliating habit she had, was this: Long after that chasm between them was closed, she still submitted to the sickness of comparisons in a most absurd way.

She realized at a certain point that they were part of a pattern, but defied the statistics of the pattern. She saw them everywhere, in all of the TV dramas where boy meets girl, then boy and girl set off to save the world. So she and Bobby weren’t saving the world, but the parallels weren’t lost on her.

She took to watching _The X-Files_ reruns almost compulsively. She watched Mulder and Scully and thought, “maybe we weren’t so bad,” because Mulder was elusive and Scully mostly just dealt with it, and even with the weight of government conspiracies and the end of the world on their shoulders, it took them awhile to need each other.

_It took them awhile to need each other._

And so she sometimes fit the stereotype of a woman, she accepted, because the truth was that back when things were still new between them, what she wanted most was that need to exist.

But they were nearing eight years, and he hadn’t been abducted by aliens, and she wasn’t carrying a miracle baby. And the viewers in their audience, she thought, didn’t know implicitly that she had succumb to another stereotype—that she had fallen in love with her partner.

 

 

Well, somewhere along the way, she lost the philosophy of what was and what should have been. The chasm of unfamiliarity and uncertainty dissolved, and Eames would have said that should have been it, but something took its place. Multiple somethings. One thing solved, another thing puzzled, and so it went.

She almost died. He almost died. Their partnership almost died.

But one day at lunch, Nichols asked, “How long have you two actually been partners?”

“Ten years. Eleven weeks.” Goren spoke so automatically that Eames almost dropped her iced tea.

“Days?” Nichols prompted with a strangely smug tone.

Goren shrugged. “Six.”

“Bobby?”

“I remember dates.”

“Important ones?” Nichols, again.

“Some.”

 

 

The most costly mistake Eames made in her analysis of what Detectives Alex Eames and Robert Goren meant and were to each other was that he had also had ten years, eleven weeks, and six days to scrutinize the thing that was them.

It was actually at ten years, twenty weeks, and three days that Bobby pushed the “1” on the elevator wall and watched the door close before saying—so nonchalantly that she would have been irritated in any other situation—“Do you know how it is we’re different? When it occurred to me that we were something else, it colored how I looked at the rest.”

She didn’t reply; he had scaled her invisible wall and was standing smugly on the other side, knowing full well she had no dogs to ward him off. He took her silence as permission to expound. “I think you’ve known, in the most noncommittal method of knowing, that this was happening, but you tried to analyze me, you, and us based on the presupposition that it wasn’t.

I didn’t. It’s been years since the decisions I’ve made were preceded by wondering what my partner would think, because I started to wonder what _Alex Eames_ —who exists outside of Major Cases, and exists so fully and without rivalry in my life—what _she_ would think. We’ve been on this slow path a long time now. You’ve kept us here, not me.

So what’s left to ask isn’t questions like, _What does Eames think?_ or _How does Eames feel?_ I know what’s here. What I need to know is if you’ll ever want to get off.”

The second immediately after the word “off” left his lips, the elevator door slid open, and a crowd of people joined them for the rest of their descent.

 

 

Certainly, being a person’s partner for over ten years had its advantages. Either she knew that Goren intended to have an answer or he surmised from her impatient shuffling in the elevator that she desperately needed him to follow her in the direction of her apartment. Whichever. It was irrelevant.

She threw herself to the front of the elevator crowd and out its door, and he followed. She took hurried steps down the sidewalk, and he followed. All the way, he followed. She opened her door, threw her coat and purse on her couch, and turned to the expectant expression she had anticipated. She confessed her defeat with a sigh. “Bobby, if I had known there were exits, I would have taken one a long time ago.”

 

 

 

 

The splendor of that first kiss, she also anticipated, and it occurred to her as her whole body went warm from her love of that kiss, that it was actually Mulder who fell in love with Scully first, and maybe she wasn’t so great a detective after all.


End file.
